Growth of group III nitride films by pulsed electron beam deposition

We have grown group III nitride films on Al2O3 (0 0 0 1), 6H–SiC (0 0 0 1), and ZnO (View the MathML source0001¯) substrates by pulsed electron beam deposition (PED) for the first time and investigated their characteristics. We found that c-plane AlN and GaN grow epitaxially on these substrates. It has been revealed that the growth of GaN on atomically flat 6H–SiC substrates starts with the three-dimensional mode and eventually changes into the two-dimensional mode. The GaN films exhibited strong near-band-edge emission in their room temperature photoluminescence spectra. We also found that the use of PED allows us to reduce the epitaxial growth temperature for GaN down to 200 °C.